Measures of edge-uncolorability of cubic graphs

There are many hard conjectures in graph theory, like Tutte’s 5-flow conjecture, and the 5-cycle double cover conjecture, which would be true in general if they would be true for cubic graphs. Since most of them are trivially true for 3-edgecolorable cubic graphs, cubic graphs which are not 3-edge-c...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fiol Mora, Miquel Àngel|||0000-0003-1337-4952, Mazzuoccolo, Giuseppe, Steffen, Eckhard
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/126896
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/126896
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Graph theory
Cubic graph
edge-coloring
snark
Grafs, Teoria de
Classificació AMS::05 Combinatorics::05C Graph theory
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Matemàtiques i estadística::Matemàtica discreta::Teoria de grafs
Descripción
Sumario:There are many hard conjectures in graph theory, like Tutte’s 5-flow conjecture, and the 5-cycle double cover conjecture, which would be true in general if they would be true for cubic graphs. Since most of them are trivially true for 3-edgecolorable cubic graphs, cubic graphs which are not 3-edge-colorable, often called snarks, play a key role in this context. Here, we survey parameters measuring how far apart a non 3-edge-colorable graph is from being 3-edge-colorable. We study their interrelation and prove some new results. Besides getting new insight into the structure of snarks, we show that such measures give partial results with respect to these important conjectures. The paper closes with a list of open problems and conjectures.